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Automating Development in FoxPro

I don't use all of these approaches but I did want to touch on his Using Project Hooks and describe one of the ways we make use of this.

We have a fairly "remote" development team with developers in Canada, the US and aboard. We use SourceOffSite to manage our code base which offers its own challenges but one of the trickiest things we have to deal with is creating production builds with the latest versions.

If I build version 2.5.1 of an application and my co-worker has to build it the next day, we want to make sure that he builds version 2.5.2. Now, sure, you could always make sure you get the latest of the project metadata via SourceSafe but that's a bit of a hassle.

Instead, we maintain a table with all of the version numbers for the various apps (there are over 100). The table is stored as XML on our web server. In the BeforeBuild process, when building an application, we download the XML file and convert it to a cursor using XMLTOCURSOR().

We then verify that the application in question is in the table and update the version numbers, first updating the PROJECT version # (provided the table has a later version) and then assigning a new common version #. The file is then reconverted to XML and re-posted to the web server.

We've added a number of other checks into our project process as well (such as copying the EXE to the latest Builds folder, etc) but the end result is that we can have multiple developers working on multiple applications and never need to worry about the version numbers getting out of sync. All thanks to project hooks.

We also did a number of other useful items such as posting notes for the release each you did a rebuild (we had a check to say "Are you building a public release" for this) - while developers may not always provide the most "public-ready" comments about a build, they have helped provide the basis for release notes for every project.

Certainly, it might be nice for some development teams to have larger application life cycle management tools but the cost and implementation requirements for those tools is very often prohibitive. What's great about FoxPro for smaller shops is that it's easy to build all the little pieces you need!

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I got some interesting feedback from Bill Drew of the Chicago Foxpro Users Group. It seems one of the members is using Fox Trails as a code generator. Instead of generating html, he has it creating Foxpro PRGs. If your interested, I can try and get some more information for you.

What's interesting here is the breakdown of people. Yes, I think it's understandable that the Fox community is getting older.

Another factor is the growth of the mobile and web environments taking over development. These environments really do push people towards the newer non-SQL or free SQL/hosted environments but more towards hosted storage options like Amazon and Google. A tool like FoxInCloud that helps MOVE existing applications to the cloud inherently competes with those environments.

But FoxInCloud also allows developers to extend their application further by giving them a starting point using Javascript and the basic CSS (such as Bootstrap). If you're not rebuilding your application from scratch, it's certainly a great step forward.

In a move that will be sure to anger open source (or rather anti-paid software, anti-Microsoft open source) zealots, Microsoft is planning to buy GitHub.

A year ago, I mused about why Microsoft would shut down CodePlex and how the world needs competing source code repositories to be strong. I'm not the only one per this Slashdot article :
"...people have warned about GitHub becoming as large as it did as problematic because it concentrates too much of the power to make or break the open source world in a single entity, moreso because there were valid questions about GitHubs financial viability...." - Jacques Mattheij

I will be interested in seeing this play out - whether developers jump ship or not. Have all the efforts Microsoft has made in pushing towards open source be seen as genuine or will all the zealots jump ship or maybe even attack?

Microsoft's comment about why they shut down CodePlex referred to how spammers were using CodePlex. Well, GitHub has its own …

I just received an update for Office 365. It certainly includes some cool features - including starting in one environment and picking it up in another environment. In recent years, I've certainly enjoined the use of Continuity on a Mac and in fact, I feel spoiled being able to start a message in one environment (even Google) and then finish it off on another. This has become some pervasive when we were reviewing our most recent backlog at a client site, a similar feature was added to the current workload.

But with web applications, the trend is to reduce the amount of software on a client machine. I used to have automatic backup for all of my machines (thanks Carbonite!) but these days, many of my machines don't need anything beyond the core OS and some basic applications. Certainly that's the feeling with Chromebooks and even the lightweight aspect of many iOS apps. The functionality is mostly in the cloud.